Hosting Your Band Website

Signing Up For Your Own Hosting

If you can afford the hosting fees per month, then it is highly recommended to have your band’s website fully hosted. This is whether or not you have made it big or not yet. It doesn’t hurt to start setting up your website infrastucture BEFORE you get famous.

Of course, all larger indie bands are definitely going to have their own hosting plan setup right away. To mess around with free hosts can severely deter your potential fans. But even bands who don’t have a following yet will benefit from hosting it on their own in the beginning. Paid hosting places offer a lot more space to host your band’s files, more bandwidth for large file (MP3s) transfer, ability to run server side php/cgi/asp scripts, ability to stream your files, video serving, etc. Many offer auto-installable goodies like Blogs, Web Forums, E-commerce machines, along with their packages. Most allow you to install third party server side software for all those cool extra things you’d like to do.

Before deciding on a webhost, you should definitely shop around. There is a lot of competition in this field because it is a subscription based model like cable or your telephone, so there’s a lot of money that stands to be made by these companies. You want to compare the different prices along with different options for each of the plans that a host offers. Many have three or four different plans based on the need for personal or business website hosting.

You may not want to go overboard in the beginning and get the most expensive plan. Most webhosts will allow you to upgrade (and refund you the difference for the purchase price of the lesser plan) so there is no rush to get the best plan right away. Also, many hosts will give you discounts for signing up for multiple years (much like cellphone plans). You might want to just pay month by month if possible to start with, if you are testing out a new host.

So now you want the names of some good webhosts for music related sites right? Well, I can only really recommend one hosting service: Dreamhost.com . The reason I can only recommend them is that we’ve only ever BEEN with them. Going on almost 4 years now. That should pretty much speak for itself.

Dreamhost is definitely not the cheapest webhost around, but we’ve been highly satisfied with them for a number of reasons. They are FAIRLY cheap for hosting, have a sufficient amount of webspace and bandwidth for all plans, offer a large number of server side products, offer free unlimited SQL databases, and a large number of webmail boxes and ftp/shell accounts. But of course one of the most important things is that their customer service is extremely responsive. They treat all their customers the same, whether you’re a big roller with huge numbers of multiple websites running a dedicated server with them or whether you’re in a band and just have one small website on a shared server.

Like I said, please do your own comparisons regarding webhosts and most importantly get opinions from ACTUAL customers (and hopefully customers who also play in bands). But if you’d like to check out their plans as a starting point here is their site:

www.dreamhost.com

Like we said before, there are a million reasons to actually get your OWN host instead of being sub-hosted off a free site. Although free hosts are plentiful nowadays with the capacity to store a lot of files, they inevitably lead to trouble down the line, especially if you become famous. And we all know your band is going to become famous,right?

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